080406 Manure Day

It has been an exciting and hectic day here at the Red Lodge. After a winter that was fairly easy (a couple of storms had me busy with the shovel and my neighbor plowed my driveway twice, but I never started the engine on the snow blower), spring has been slow to materialize. The ten day forecasts continually keep sixty degree weather just out of reach. We anxiously watch those days in their sixties draw close and then evaporate into another day when it never budges out of the fifties. Today, however, we crossed the hump. Night time lows will not get below freezing again. I can feel it. Springtime is bound to come in a meaningful way any day now.

We celebrated here by putting six five gallon buckets in the back of the Chevy Maxx and driving down to the free manure sign by the side of the state highway and loading up. Brandi was only there for moral support. She makes a point of not getting too involved on manure day.

Back at the Red Lodge, she carried a folding chair and a puzzle book down to the bottom flat so that she could be on hand for manure day festivities without getting her hands dirty so to speak. Today I learned the lesson that I believe I learned last year and perhaps the year before – six five gallon pails of horse manure makes a thin cover over less than one quarter of the garden.

Attentive readers from way back in the before time when I set up the first overly ambitious website while learning HTML might remember the dimensions of my garden. It is not big. I will venture a guess at fourteen feet by fourteen feet. When I bought the Red Lodge, I discovered a couple of rolls of six foot tall chain link fence discarded in a pile beside the mighty Tassawassa Creek and the garden is exactly as big an area as that fence would enclose and protect from the marauding gangs of deer who roam these streets freely.

The garden has the advantage of being so close to the Tassawassa that it barely needs to be watered. The ground water is right there. In fact, when the first spring thaws send water gushing out of Dunham Hollow, the garden is on the bank of the Tassawassa and half the lower flat disappears. The garden also has the disadvantage of being so close to the Tassawassa that trees shade the southern half much of the day.

The garden was a mess after being neglected most of last year. In 2006, when I should have been planting, I was writing to my readers from sunny Citrus County Florida where my father winters. After driving him back to Dutchess Count, New York, I lost two days a week of the summer driving down to keep up his house and arrange the sale of the house where I grew up. When I needed to be paying close attention to bring my into harvest, I was driving Dad back to Florida and setting up his place. I came back to tomatoes rotting on the vine and broccoli that had shot up to seed and that’s how I let it sit.

So today I went down and raked off the leaves, pulled out the old, brittle cutworm guards that used to be juice containers, turned the soil, shifted out the plant matter and spread my manure. I topped it off by laying the old window sashes I pried out of the walls last year when I got ambitious and bought low-E replacement windows for the living room. They should give me nice warm manure. One quarter of my garden is now visible as a dark brown mass as I gaze out the kitchen window. The rest waits to see if Brandi wants to make another manure run tomorrow.

Coming this summer: The Earth Box Experiment.